vilaine fille

Around and about

Vision/Action: Designers of the Next Generation is an exhibit on view through 22 September at Hebrew Union College. It includes many objects sure to intrigue readers of vilaine fille: a series of posters by Tamar Dekel illustrating Serge Gainsbourg songs (I want them all!); a lovely puppet theatre by Nirit Arbeli of Tristan und Isolde; images based on the play The Magic Flute of Baghdad, riffing on Mozart and the Gulf War (my Hebrew isn’t good enough to tell you more); and several stunning photographs by Michal Chelbin, whose work you see at left, and whose sources range from Caravaggio and Velázquez to Diane Arbus.

HUC is located at One West Fourth Street (across from Dojo); info at 212-824-2205.

The Bang on a Can Marathon takes place on Sunday, 4 June, from 11h30 to 22h00 at World Financial Center. Admission is free; performers include the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Maya Beiser, Alarm Will Sound, and Glenn Kotche; composers include vilaine fille favorite Annie Gosfield.

Starting on 2 June, The Rubin Museum of Art, conveniently located on West 17th Street, presents “The Icarus Syndrome,” a series of films touching on themes raised in the exhibit “Take to the Sky: Flying Mystics in Himalayan Art.” Favorites include Dr. Strangelove, Der Himmel über Berlin, and the 1924 Peter Pan. Admission is free with a $7.00 bar minimum; most films start at 21h30 (yay). Info at 212-620-5000.

For now, one final item for your summer calendar: On 2 August, Central Park SummerStage presents a dramatic reading of excerpts from An Iliad, a retelling by Alessandro Baricco of the Homeric poem, translated by Ann Goldstein. (Baricco, like vilaine fille, is piemontese and very cute. That said, I have no idea whether Don Lisander himself will be in attendance.) I never really “got” Homeric poetry before seeing and hearing Iliad I performed by the Aquila Theatre Company several years ago. (Aquila used Stanley Lombardo’s translation, which I commend to you all.)

Bloom

Hey, vilaine fille is back! Care lettrici, cari lettori statunitensi, I hope that you had a safe and relaxing holiday.

Rufus Wainwright’s ebullient, soulful “Bloom” as performed by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City will indeed be broadcast this evening on WNYC, sometime after 19h00 EDT.

Furthermore, you can catch “Bloom” with the choreography of Stephen Petronio on 14 July (la fête nationale!) at Central Park SummerStage. The performance is free of charge.

vilaine fille will be at Rufola’s 14 June Carnegie Hall concert. Will you? If not, dry your tears and powder your nose, ma poule, ’cause the evening will be recorded and released as a CD (and, presumably, as an iTunes download). Read all about it at Time Out New York (follow-up article here).

By the way, the Young People’s Chorus give their annual Spring Concert on 3 June at the 92nd Street Y. The evening includes beautiful new works by Mark Adamo and Bobby Previte. You can purchase tickets by calling 212-415-5500. (Please see my earlier post on YPC’s “Transient Glory” program.)

Pensée du dimanche 28 mai

Laissez-moi danser !

I wish my fellow USians a fabulous Memorial Day weekend! *smooch*

Turbulence

My beloved venticinque lettori, I apologize for the thin postings of late. vilaine fille is in a strange place.

I am feeling very crotchety. (Example: Fed up with shoddy modern technology, I purchased a corded, rotary telephone.) I decided to cancel cable service upon realizing that the happiest and most productive times of my life were when I had no television. (Okay, I’m going to wait until after you-know-what to pull the plug. Allez les Bleus! Forza Azzurri!)

I’ve (uncharacteristically) taken to doing my own baking, drinking jet-fuel espresso, and using a bracingly sharp-and-rotund old-world fragrance.

I’m also kashering my kitchen. This has involved flinging cherished items I’ve had for decades, buying lots of new stuff (yay!), big-time scrubbing, much sloshing of boiling water… No blowtorching yet, but we’re getting there, and somehow my candy-ass self isn’t remotely panicked. What’s going on?

No answers for now, but here’s the stuff you’re really interested in reading.

• I didn’t attend the Volpe gala, sensing that it would be a bore. Based on what I heard on the radio, I made the right call. The only performances that struck me as gala-worthy were Pape’s “Ella giammai m’amò”—like buttah (but why in Italian?) and Zajick’s grand, elemental “O mon Fernand.”
  
  Hvorostovsky was admirably long-breathed but also in his oh-it’s-Verdi-gotta-PUSH mode. (Nyet, nyet, moi drugh!) I have heard JDF sing the Semiramide aria better. I liked Fleming’s Trovatore more than I expected to, especially the ripe, juicy trills in “Di tale amor.” (A soprano who sings her trills! How retro-chic in this age of… Never mind.)
  
  Novelty songs? Can’t be bothered. Dessay in Sonnambula? What do you expect an orfanella like vilaine fille to say?
  
  I will not pick on the infirm and the superannuated, but someone, please, enlighten me: What in blazes do Roberto Alagna’s out-of-tune, marbles-in-his-mouth yawping, crooning, hollering, and bawling have to do with singing and music?
  
  Please read the superb reports by sister Sieglinde and brothers JSU and Muori.

• I am getting, like, 200 hits a day from people searching for “Filianoti.” Could it be the dreaded pazza di Filianoti? Anyway, I caught a second Elisir, which was better than the first, though still worrisome in terms of oversinging. Filianoti received a long, rapturous confetti-shower at his curtain-call—not wholly deserved, in my view, though a sweet arrivederci to a lovable newcomer.
  
  When I interviewed Don Peppino, he opined that Carmen needed to be sung in a true opéra-comique (and not verismo) style. Lo and behold, Filianoti takes on Don José under Marc Minkowski at the Châtelet in 2007. Minkowski, a master of légèreté, gives me hope (Magdalena Kozená gives a ravishing and true-to-herself account of Eboli’s Chanson du voile under Minkowski in her French recital); Don José gives me pause. (Villazón, another tenor who burns too hot for his own good, started going bad after adding Carmen to his repertoire.) Tocchiamo ferro.

• You need to see An Inconvenient Truth. I love and have always loved Al Gore, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. (A Harvard wonk—what’s not to love?)

• An e-mail from a perfect Wagnerite, miffed at my Parsifal review:
  
  Are you Jewish? … Your review makes me yearn for the days of the camps.

• Two noteworthy events:
  
  On Monday, 29 May, WNYC presents the Young People’s Chorus of New York City’s Transient Glory V concert as part of its American Music Festival. I’m not certain that Rufus Wainwright’s “Bloom” will be included in the broadcast (I’m trying to get confirmation), but with or without Rufola’s music, it’s a splendid program.
  
  The smashing Aquila Theatre Company takes part in two Medea-related events: On 1 June, the NYU conference “Enacting Medea: Theatre, Opera, and Film”; and on 3 June, a Carnegie Hall concert performance of Cherubini’s opera Médée (including spoken dialogue).

• P.S. to Sieglinde re: our darling boys with big sticks, I am very, very down on the several varieties of trash alongside whom Bernie (Burn, baby, burn!), Derek, Jorge, Mo, and the other true Yankees must play. But compare this with this. Donnie, we hardly knew ye!

Benvenute e benvenuti

Finally, I am taking care of some basic site maintenance. (Ça fait longtemps, n’est-ce pas ?)

Please welcome the following groovy gals and guys to vilaine fille’s extended blog family:

the concert

just muttering

today in buenos aires (Buen otoño, chiquita !)

Gaisberg’s Tempting Leg (That’s almost Gainsbourg!)

High and Low Notes (Hi, Rich!)

e! [masif nanik atak] (Si seulement je pouvais vous lire…)

Bank of America Celebrity Series

Chicago Classical Music

As always, if you link to vilaine fille and I do not return the favor, please drop me a note using the link on my About page.

Pensée du dimanche 21 mai

Masquerading as a normal person
day after day is exhausting.
—Anonymous

The quote is from Moxie, a sweet little book that I picked up for my sister K, which she will hand down to my soon-to-be-safely-delivered* g-dchild Angela, an angel who already guides and protects me. I pray that Angela have bucketsful of moxie and that she never, ever aspire to be a “nice” girl.

* Please G-d, ptui ptui ptui, inch’Allah, tocchiamo ferro, touchons du bois, etc.

Oh, how much money I could have saved on shrinkage and the like armed with this bit of wisdom!

Parsifal II

From Newsday, here is the review by vilaine fille alter ego Marion Lignana Rosenberg of the Metropolitan Opera’s Parsifal.

A few more words of wisdom from my beloved sister, Fred Nietzsche:

It happened at Wagner’s funeral: the first German Wagner Association, that of Munich, placed a wreath on his grave, with an inscription that immediately became famous. It read: “Redemption for the redeemer!”… But many (strangely enough!) made the same small correction: “Redemption from the redeemer!”—One heaved a sigh of relief.

[In Parsifal] the cunning in his alliance of beauty and sickness goes so far that, as it were, it casts a shadow over Wagner’s earlier art—which now seems too bright, too healthy. Do you understand this? Health, brightness having the effect of a shadow? almost of an objection?—To such an extent have we become pure fools.—Never was there a greater master in dim, hieratic aromas…

I missed Maestro Levine’s way with Tricky Dickie’s “dim, hieratic aromas,” to which he is so sublimely attuned. And I rejoiced in Ben Heppner’s triumph: If his voice has occasionally betrayed him, his great and beautiful soul has never betrayed us listeners or the cause of music. (And didn’t he rock at the Olympics?)

P.S. Just to cleanse my blog of Wagner’s mishigas:

I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life.
—Devarim 30

In the end, I really think that sums up why he hated us so.

L’elisir d’amore

So, the second coming, a.k.a. Il ritorno di Don Peppino al Metropolitan, had its bumps. Filianoti’s voice twice, for an instant, disappeared, and I would have liked to hear a less robust sound overall. (Was he oversinging because the Met’s a barn, or might it have something to do with the lower, heavier rep—Favorite, Zauberflöte, Werther—he sang between the fall Lucias and now?)

In any event, what was good was surpassingly so. Filianoti may be the finest comic actor I’ve seen in opera. (He looks uncannily like Frodo Baggins in this staging. Someone who can get their hands on a photo should do a separated-at-birth.) His enunciation is well-night perfect, and his legato could hardly be better. His every phrase has heart, sparkle, point.

From Newsday, here is my review of L’elisir d’amore. (Incidentally, it’s a bad time for the arts at Newsday, as elsewhere, but isn’t it grand that my editor agreed that this lovely, end-of-season Elisir was worth covering? My US Italia editor, too, jumped at the chance to run a Filianoti profile—though in that case, well, we’re Italian, and we know what’s important in life.)

When I interviewed Filianoti, he cited Aureliano Pertile’s recording of “Tu che a D-o spiegasti l’ali” from Lucia as a special favorite. Here it is, for your listening pleasure. A distinguished maestro-who-shall-remain-nameless wrote to me about this disc:

A 1924 Fonotipia, just months before the microphone changed everything…

Makes me schizo: As a conductor, I want to strangle his teachers for leaving him unprepared to sing even a single stepwise descent in legato, and for the pressurized tone which has to be “faked” into simulating the musical effects a relaxed sound could have achieved naturally.

But as a listener, I just want to go on my knees… and then the conductor wants to ask, “Maestro, can you pass on to the youngsters what it feels like to sing to the soul of your beloved, when you know she is in heaven?”

More on Elisir: But for a few ill-advised flights into the stratosphere, Ruth Ann Swenson is magnificent. (Yes, kids, this is what it sounds like when a Donizetti comic heroine is sung by an actual musician.) Corbelli sang better in the fall Lyric Opera of Chicago Cenerentola; his voice was foggy on Saturday (allergies?). The staging is as loathsome as ever.

Addendum: Sorry, I posted sans coffee. Do visit the witty and wonderful brother Roy and read about “Filianoti’s Miracle Elixir.” (All the rain makes vilaine fille very sleepy…)

Pensée du dimanche 14 mai

Elegance is refusal.
—Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel

Parsifal

Heaven knows when mlr’s Newsday review of the Met’s Parsifal will run, so here’s the not-ready-for-primetime version by vilaine fille:

• Heppner: In glorious form—no sign whatsoever of the Lohengrin croaks.
• Pape: How do you think he sang? (Actually, he’s in less fresh voice than the last time I heard his Gurnemanz.)
• Hampson: I have no words (yet).
• Meier: Ape-sh*t amazing—the best I’ve seen and heard her in the role. Screaming, whooping ovations, even from stick-up-their-bum “Adolf-dear-it’s-PARSIFAL” Wagner Society types.
• Conducting: Meh (sorry).

There are only two more performances, on 15 and 18 May. Go.

P.S. Overheard on the downtown M7 bus:

Wagner? He also had that thing about swans.